Homeschooling Autism - Part 1

This post has a bold title and I am afraid I will invite criticism for "generalizing" homeschooling based on just my personal situation and my sons's specific autistic disorder. But I see a few other families with autism with similar issues so I am going to go ahead and write this article anyway.

Once upon a time, I thought I could home school my son with autism without too many difficulties. Just find some other families and homeschooling groups to hang out with, put him in some community programs with support and keep going with the home therapy program and there you have it. My version of no-public-schooling and hence "homeschooling".

Let me break it down for families considering homeschooling a child with autism. Not just special needs, but AUTISM. Because those of us with an autistic person in the home, know that often the real frustration is not of lower intelligence, less understanding, lack of motivation to be with others, but rather the inability to express through the body what is happening in the mind.

Introduction: A little about the student and the teacher.


The student

Imagine for one instance, having thoughts, needs, ideas, high intelligence and desire to share them with others, but a body that is so disobedient. The words are not forming themselves in to conversations. When they are uttered they don't make sense, and you know it but you have little control over it. People cannot read your mind and so you are stuck in an endless cycle of miscommunication and being misunderstood.

So you either behave negatively knowing you will get in to trouble, because it is the only thing that you know is predictable; Or you don't really make an effort convinced that you will fail anyway. Later you sulk and punish yourself. Slowly this makes you lonelier, more frustrated, angrier, more depressed and erodes your self esteem.

No matter what new communication trick you take months to learn, you find that by the time you have acquired it, your peers are light years ahead of you. You do not understand or speak their language. When they come up to you, it is like an avalanche of information. You are still trying to figure out their body language, when they start uttering words. You are trying to figure out their words, they change their tones. You try to learn the tone and the context has changed. You try to pick up contexts but turns out they weren't really saying what they mean anyway, you were supposed to read between the lines.

Unless everyone who meets you quietens down, limits their channels of communication, and makes painstaking effort to get to know you and your nuances on a very personal level, there is no hope for any successful communication. Every encounter is a series of downhill tumbles in to inevitable breakdown.

Your disobedient body, will not comply with your cognitive abilities and your desire to communicate.

Perhaps not all autistic individuals experience physical dysregulation (or what I like to call body disobedience) quite to the extent that K does, but many will experience this phenomenon to some extent.

Now imagine being a lot smarter, determined, sensitive, receptive and motivated than the average person and being at the far end of the physical dysregulation scale as you can possibly imagine. That is K. Unfortunately.

He is the student of this home school.

The teacher

I get to watch and observe this phenomenon 24 hours a day.

It is hard to even type and put it in to words. Separating emotion from this complicated science of behavior is near impossible for me as his mother. Factor in my own ignorance, lack of resources and imperfections as a human being and you have the equivalent of a mind being slowly compressed in a G-clamp.

I am the principal, primary teacher and administrator of this home school.

I have no formal training and there is no system in existence that trains or supports this kind of teacher.

Stay tuned for more in this series. In future posts I intend to talk about curriculum, socialization, community resources, alternatives to homeschooling and other exciting stuff.